• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

Privacy officials in California, Connecticut and Colorado said Tuesday they are investigating businesses that don't appear to be honoring signals consumers send through the Global Privacy Control -- a browser setting that transmits requests to opt out of online ad targeting.

“Today, along with our law enforcement partners throughout the country, we have identified businesses refusing to honor consumers' requests to stop selling their personal data and have asked them to immediately come into compliance with the law," California Attorney General Rob Bonta stated.

California, Connecticut and Colorado are among the state that have enacted privacy laws requiring companies to allow consumers to opt out of targeted advertising.

Privacy laws in Connecticut and Colorado explicitly require companies to honor universal opt-out requests -- like those sent through the “Global Privacy Control."

In California, the state attorney general has said businesses that collect personal data must comply with opt-out requests sent through the Global Privacy Control. (Ad industry groups disagree with the state's interpretation of its privacy law, and have argued to the attorney general and Governor Gavin Newsom that the text of the law allows companies to choose between offering an opt-out link on their homepages or honoring opt-out preference signals.)

Some developers -- including Mozilla, Brave and DuckDuckGo -- have built the Global Privacy Control into their browsers. The control is also available as a browser extension.

News of the states' investigative sweep comes around five months after researchers at Consumer Reports and Wesleyan University reported that popular retail sites often fail to honor opt-out requests that are transmitted via a universal opt-out mechanism.

For that study, researchers tested 40 sites operated by larger retailers. Twelve of those sites apparently failed to honor opt-out requests that were sent through the Global Privacy Control.

That result “corroborates previous research on the topic and strongly suggests that consumers’ personal information may continue to be at risk for unwanted disclosure even when they take the appropriate steps to protect themselves under state privacy laws,” the report stated.